Top 5 Conference Call Do’s and Dont’s

Everyone has their own style on a conference call – it’s your communications style. But there are certain things that you should and shouldn’t do while on a conference call.

We put together this list for you to keep handy. These are the moist common do’s and dont’s of the conference call world. Did we miss any?

1. Do announce yourself when speaking

During a question and answer session or discussion time, say your name before you start speaking. It allows presenters to refer to you in a more personable way and they’ll be able to reference you or your question later on, if needed.

2. Do check the placement of your headset

One of the most common pet peeves in meetings is hearing the ‘heavy breather’ for the duration of the call. Make sure your headset microphone is at an appropriate distance from your mouth or nose.

3. Do send a meeting request rather than an email

In that first meeting request, do your best to include all information including a dial-in phone number, conference code and a link to the web meeting. It can be annoying to get five updates with time changes, added web conferencing information or new numbers, not to mention that it gets confusing and potentially makes it difficult for people to join your meeting.

4. Do pay attention

When you’re not in a face-to-face meeting, it’s very easy to get distracted. Limit your multi-tasking while on conference calls. One of the most embarrassing situations that can happen is to be called on and either not respond or not have a clue what is being asked of you.

Act as if your conference call is a face-to-face meeting (hopefully you wouldn’t be checking your email or sending an IM if people were sitting across the table from you) and you won’t get caught in this sticky situation!

5. Do learn the mute function

This was by far the most popular response from my team! We all know that there are a variety of things that can happen in the “background” of a conference call: dogs barking, keyboards being typed on, sneezing, children running around, loud speaker announcements at the airport, etc. So, it’s important to learn how to mute your phone.

On the flip side of that, make sure you know how to un-mute it, too. If I had a dollar for every time I heard, “Sorry, I was talking but my line was muted…” I’d be rich!

1. Don’t join a large group of people from a sub-par speaker phone

It is very hard to be on one end of a conference call and to try to hear a group of people in a large room gathered around a conference phone. If you need to do this, make sure you test the phone and assign one person to repeat any questions or comments.

2. Don’t let someone dominate the call

Make sure that you are being respectful of others’ time. Don’t let one person go on a tangent and rule the call. At a pause in the speaking, ask that person if he will continue the conversation off-line after the conference call.

3. Don’t talk over people

We realize that it can be difficult to get used to being on a conference call and not physically seeing when someone is about to talk. However, for that reason, you need to allow for the appropriate amount of silence before talking. If you’re asking for questions, allow your audience time to think.

If you’ve talked over someone, allow that person to repeat what they’ve said. If you have a large group of people attending a call, I’d suggest using Operator Assisted or Direct Event conference calls so that an operator can facilitate the question and answer portion of the meeting.

4. Don’t stray from the agenda

This one is easier said than done! A good tip is to make sure that you have an agenda for every meeting. That way, if you get off task, you can always refer back to the agenda to get everyone focused. To start off on the right foot, either send out the agenda prior to the meeting or show it during your web meeting.

5. Don’t be late

While the InterCall Lounge is fun to listen to while waiting for the call to start, it’s not professional to leave your audience waiting for more than a few minutes. Make it a practice to arrive at least three minutes before call start time. If you’re invited to a meeting, make sure to be on time. It’s disrespectful to leave a group of people waiting.

By learning from your conferencing service and paying attention to these few tips, you’ll be conference call pro in no time! Is there a conference call don’t that really gets you going? Tell me about it below.

Good question, Bernard. I think you need to look at the footprint of the provider. Many conferencing companies say they are international, but you can’t offer only local or toll-free dial-in options and say you are global. A good provider will have offices around the globe, the ability to bill in various currencies, give you reports for all of your international usage, offer customer support in multiple languages and have a worldwide infrastructure.

I often find it difficult to join a conference, and so do my customers. Here is feedback from one I did today (i’ve changed some digits to *):

I type: 2746428***
Conf Center gets: 22744664428***
And every time different numbers are repeated.

The virtual ‘person’ is not very forgiving for ‘incorrect digits’, does not give much time and closes the call if you don’t get the code right first time. This is quite difficult when juggling on a smartphone swapping between the invite and the phone dialer app to enter the number, only to find it did not work.

Kev, that does sound frustrating. Here are two option that might help alleviate the need to remember/find and enter numbers, conference codes and PINs.
1) Have you tried MobileMeet? It is our free app that stores you account information and that of frequently used conferences. It would save you the hassle of swapping between the invite and phone keypad because everything happens in one spot, automatically. You can download it from the app store or get more information here: http://www.intercall.com/tools/mobile-meet.php
2) You can use Call Manager (for free) or upgrade to Unified Meeting 5 (fee-based and with more functionality). With both of these platforms, you manage your conference call through the web interface. To join the meeting, you click a link, confirm the number to dial and wait for your phone to ring. Plus, you can see who is on the call, who’s speaking and show people what you are talking about.

I hope one of these will work for you. I use Unified Meeting 5 for all my meetings and can’t remember the last time I had to manually enter the numbers and codes, which makes life much easier.

Thanks for your suggestions Jill.
However, it’s not just me who has these problems, the example text I pasted in was from one of my customers trying to attend my bridge I’d set up. Quite difficult to ask him to install an app !

Yeah, it may not be practical to have everyone joining your call download MobileMeet, but hopefully Call Manager or Unified Meeting 5 would be a good alternative. Only the host has to have an account and schedule the meeting using the Outlook plug-in. Neither of them require participants to downlaod anything (unless they are sharing their screen). Even if participants aren’t at their computers, they can still tap the link from their mobile device to avoid dialing. Here’s more inforamtion about Call Manager http://www.intercall.com/tools/call-manager.php and Unified Meeting 5 http://www.intercall.com/services/web-conferencing/unified-meeting.php. There are videos on those pages to show you how they work.